Song No.9
Written by Steve Hillier
Date Written January 1991, Refined January 1995
Place Written Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Released When January 1996
Originally Sung By Steve Hillier
Features Roland S-760, EMU Drumulator, Korg M3R
“…You can’t face me, I’m just your flatmate’s girlfriend, and Monday I’ll be gone”Student life, another song inspired by real events. I’m particularly pleased with this lyric, every time I hear it I’m taken back to Shortridge Terrace in Jesmond, a shared house I stayed in with my girlfriend before eventually moving north in 1998:
I came to this town, a weekend with my boyfriend, his final year away this time, but..
Remember how we sneaked around the last time?
And without a sound, we knew that New Year's just around the corner, somehow
I should be somebody's partner, but we know he's working late, a barman at the Union… and left me in the house…
You were there
Remember your alarm clock on his bedside and thinking we'd be heard?
No one came
Christmas seemed so far behind me, we know New Year couldn't be the same
You can't face me
I'm just your flatmate's girlfriend
And Monday I'll be gone , and until then
I won't touch you, I won't smile, I won't try,
You will laugh and be the same,
And I won't cry , because
New Year's going to be the same
Song No.9 was part of The Joans’ live set, although the Dubstar version was a significant update. The drums were supplied by my Drumulator drum machine in an overt homage to Robin Guthrie’s unique style of programming. There’s also a reference to Frazier Chorus’s Forgetful in the intro of this song. Their album Sue had been one of my favourites in my first year in Newcastle when the events set out in this song occurred.
This is one of the rare Dubstar songs that began life as a chord sequence, and I think you can tell. There are three distinct melodies that fit under the main sequence (the first you hear on the piano version above). They don’t work together, you have to hear them separately. So you begin with the string melody, then the vocal melody, then the dulcimer melody. I simply don’t write like that, but it happened on this occasion because I wanted to refine this song from the Joans live set to fit into the Dubstar set. In its original incarnation, it was mainly instrumental, with a middle section where I would sing almost entirely unaccompanied. That’s the vocal melody you hear in the verse in the Dubstar version. But it wouldn’t make sense to have Sarah standing there on stage with nothing to do for four minutes, so I rewrote the song to include a lot more singing, and an entirely new lyric. Trying to avoid Sarah having nothing to do onstage explains why on Make It Better there’s hardly a pause from the singing at all. Take a listen, there’s hardly time to take a breath.
I am aware that I’ve enthused about so many of the songs in this series… and I’m going to do it again now. Not only do I think that Song No.9 is the best Dubstar song, I think it’s the best song I’ve written. It has everything that I love about music. A soaring melody, drama, the lyric is concerned with something real between two people. Something that actually happened. And when it’s over, you feel like you’ve been taken somewhere.
I even like the fact that it was tucked away on a B-Side so very few people ever heard it. Funny like that.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
I Lost A Friend
Written by Steve Hillier
Date written January 2000
Place written Hove, East Sussex
Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland Juno-106, Korg Prophecy
SPOTIFY LINK
“I’ll never see him again except in memory of someone good”I left Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne in March 1997. I felt as if I’d done everything I could on Tyneside, I’d had two significant and long lasting relationships, both now ended. I’d DJed everywhere from Luckies Pub to the Riverside, performed at pretty much every night club and worked at both Universities. I’d formed a music act and we were doing well. It was time to move on, and I had a choice: London for the sake of work, or Brighton for the sake of my happiness. I chose the latter. I’ve not regretted the move once.
But I didn't leave Jesmond completely. I returned half a dozen times even before we made Make It Better back at the Arts Centre, trying to find…something. A pilgrimage, an inability to let go? These were not happy occasions, I’d alight at Central Station and pull up my hoodie or pull down a baseball cap in case I bumped into someone I knew. Paradoxically I’d hang out in the bars later that day hoping to bump into someone, anyone I knew from the old days. I think I spent more time in the Forth Hotel after leaving Newcastle than I did when I lived there.
I’m not sure exactly when it was, but one cold winter’s morning in 1998 I was walking around Newcastle city centre and into the library, just behind the HMV records that we’d opened two years earlier. I wanted to speak to my ex-girlfriend, I had no idea how to reach her. I had an address but couldn’t bring myself to simply turn up unannounced… I needed a telephone number. So ‘I searched the phone book’…nothing. More broken-hearted than depressed, I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city searching for evidence of my past. Anything that would validate the decade I’d spent on Tyneside in the rain. It’s peculiar, but now I have spent more than double the time living in Brighton than in Newcastle, I have more memories of heading north to find my past than of the past that I actually lived up there.
I Lost A Friend is that lonely day in song form, one of my favourite self-penned songs. This is what Dubstar was about, not breakbeats and rock guitars… a dagger through the heart and a melody through the head. There are two versions of this song, the I (Friday Night) B-Side and the ‘version’, which is stripped right back and loses the Smiths-style DMX drum machine for something more sympathetic to the song. I prefer that one.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
Vini (Unchained Monologue)
Written by Sarah Blackwood, Steve Hillier & Chris Wilkie
Date written March 1987, January 1994, Refined March 1997
Place written Welling, South London & Jesmond, Newcastle
Released June 1997
Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760, Roland JV-1080
“I’ve been hurt again” ‘Unchained Monologue’ was initially entitled ‘Vini’ and inspired by the Durutti Column and Imperfect List by Big Hard Excellent Fish. Twenty two years later my wife would perform Imperfect List at a Feminist Swearing Night in a pub in Brighton for the Finnish Institute. Life eh?
There are two main accompanying parts in this tune, one written on piano by me when I was at school played on the JV-1080, another from Chris. It’s the original piano composition which predated ‘Unchained Monologue’ that you can hear on this new recording. It had knocked around as a demo for The Joans for years but I could never quite get a vocal melody for it. Maybe there were too many notes going on already? So I decided not to write a melody. I took inspiration from Imperfect List and wrote a monologue translating what people say and what they mean. There was a section of the song where I’d not written anything, I’d run of things to say so Sarah filled in with ‘that noise in the background is only the TV’ and a few other lines. There’s a sampled drum fill on this track that rears its disgusting head again on ‘Rise To The Top’, a song on Make It Better. I have no idea what it’s from, I found it on Jungle tape I’d bought in Camden Market while waiting for Goodbye to be mixed at RAK. Sounds terrific.
I have mixed feelings about ‘Unchained Monologue’ now. As a writer in his early twenties, doing a dream pop version of Smiley Culture’s Cockney Translator seemed like a great idea. Now it feels alittle trite. Every word was true though, I meant it at the time and that’s what ultimately matters. And your tastes change. It’s handy to be reminded that trying to recreate the person you were when you were young-and-foolish is something only the old-and-foolish should attempt.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
I Won't Forget You (Bow Wow Now)
Written by Steve Hillier
Date Written January 1996
Place Written Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760
YOUTUBE LINK
“I can’t bear the thought You’d Have to Die Before Me“B-sides, songs that perform the function of having something (anything?) on the flip side of a vinyl single gave writers an opportunity to say something they felt needed to be said without the pressure of writing a ‘hit’. There were no expectations, you could write whatever you wanted.
They hold a unique role in the development of a 20th Century act and for a fan’s relationship with their heroes too. Growing up, I’d enjoyed the B-Sides of my favourite acts (Billy Bragg, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins) much more than the A-Sides. I wanted Dubstar to have the same connections for fans who hungered for more. Luckily that was easy in the 1990s, a decade defined by a million formats, all of which counted towards the singles chart, and all of which needed new material to fill them up. There was scope for an act to release three B-Sides with every single AND have a remix CD too. So we did.
The pressure was off when it came to writing B-Sides, I had the luxury of knowing that whatever I wrote was almost certainly going to be released. Bow Wow Now, as this song was originally known, is an example of this luxury and is one of a handful of Dubstar recordings that really deserved a better version than the released attempt. That melody, those words, the heart break…all of which could have done without the rather clumpy programming. Also, this is the only Dubstar song where the vocals were copied and pasted from one chorus to the next in a sampler. I can’t remember why, but It may have been something to do with there being no heating in our studio ‘Stink Central’ at the Arts Centre. You can hear Sarah shivering as she’s singing. It was January 1996. We were in the top twenty at the time.
Chris and Sarah were vegetarians when we recorded this song, I’ve been vegetarian now for many years too and am heading the vegan way. Consequently I’m rather pleased that we managed to have a song about the loss of an animal in the Dubstar canon. It’s not Meat is Murder, I Won’t Forget You expresses something different. It’s the closeness people achieve with their childhood pets and the grief on their passing.
So why change the name of the song? ‘Bow Wow Now’ as a title was always an ‘in-joke’. It was an attempt to hide the sentiment of the song, a cross between 90s irony and self-conscious deflection. But last night when I was playing this song for the first time in decades, it felt ridiculous to hide the meaning of the lyric. And I never liked that title. So from here on this song will be known to me as ‘I Won’t Forget You’, which is the title it should always have had.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
The View From Here
Songwriter Stephen Hillier
Date Written February 1996
Place Written Wolverhampton Town Hall
Released When June 1996
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760, Roland JD-800
Spotify Link
“…I was lost a long time”It was during the third Dubstar UK tour, just after Manic came out. Things were truly exciting. I was standing behind my keyboard setup waiting for Paul (Wadsworth, our drummer), Chris and Sarah to show up for the sound check. I played some chords on the JD-800 using a string sound that I’d modelled on the Polymoog Vox Humana that’s all over Gary Numan’s Pleasure Principle album. I was struck by the size of the room we’d sold out, how hundreds had paid money to come and see a band who’d played only a handful of shows. The opening melody just appeared out of nowhere…and it all made sense, look at the view from here, this was not just the next step, it was real. It’s a theme I’ve returned to regularly, the idea of facing the future, like the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now
